Special Features: Tsunami in South Asia

Fiona McIlroy

Special Features

Tsunami Christmas 2004 Australia

© 2005 by Fiona McIlroy and gangan books australia

 

In the night these words whispered to me on the curtain rustle.
—Take the fruit that is ripe on the branch; the branch closest to you! Accept blessings!

“You too?”

Two winners of the Asia-link grants (of which there are only twenty in the whole of Australia) sit in our Guerilla Bay living room, just introduced five minutes before. One of the women, Mary-Lee, is going to Japan to translate a classic work from a woman living 1000 years ago in Kyoto; the other, Naomi, is travelling to the Philippines to research, write and produce plays about the resilience of Filipino women in Australia.

M. said: “I feel hardly deserving, since I just sent off an application and gained it without really much more thought.”

Naomi said: “Yes, I had no idea this would fall into my lap. I think the grant sponsors want to know the recipients have a clear intention based on previous work that shows their interest in Asia; and that they won’t cause any trouble in the cross-cultural arena. They want people who know what they want to do.”

Still, the pair shook their heads in amazement at the synchronicity.
—We don’t need a grant to be linked to Asia. We are already linked to Asia by sympathy.

The rest of the extended family are sitting, eyes glazed, watching tsunami stories of horror on television. Wave after wave of shock passes through the room. An uncharacteristic silence has fallen across the blended, extended family.

There had been a bizarre cold change, with winds buffeting us as we strode the Bingi Point to scan the coal grey sea for signs of dolphins, whales or even tsunamis ... we cannot start to imagine the scale of the disaster taking place on the other side of the Pacific, and yet we are distinctly connected by threads of understanding and experience. Someone we know could be on holiday in Phuket or Malaysia. We have all travelled in Asia.

Millions of people who never have holidays live there.  Now they are surrounded by collapsed buildings, floating cars and corpses. We are here, swimming on a sea of family love and generosity, cushioned by our sense of connectedness. Yet the threads tug and tug at our rug of protection, threatening to unravel our tranquillity.

One of the younger ones says: I know the planet is going to die. I’m scared.

Another one says gently: The people living on this planet just need a big shake-up before they realise they are all part of the human family.

Yesterday the sea was fragmented, broken up by wind and foreboding. This morning, says the older brother, the sea is flat. Cold but flat; silver wrapping paper with not a wrinkle on it. No memory of what has passed the day before.

Today the houses will be cleaned, the glasses dried, and our Christmas will disappear into the celluloid on the laptop to accompany next season’s dried arrangements.

We will all take with us the strong flavours of our laughter, an abundant table of stories and fruits from land and sea. The links to Asia are deeply felt, and like the tectonic plates we lurch from comfort to fear, from compassion to awe.

Memories of a recurrent childhood nightmare keep swamping me. A massive wave towers over my head as I run screaming with my family. This dream remains close to consciousness. Like the snarling lion teeth gnashing close to my face, the tsunami is poised in slow motion ready to close its jaws with a crash.

Only the distance of sea and land separates us from the hundreds of thousands taken by the wall of water. There is a fine line between them and me, a thin veil between dream and reality.

One last coffee is offered before we depart. Somehow the aroma of coffee on this final morning of our feasting is so pungent it brings tears.

© Fiona McIlroy
28 December 2004

 


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